About

The product where you’re not allowed to touch the design

A mature, live product; the job was new functionality. Most of the work sat around financial reporting – we designed the statements sections, an area where the data is dense and misreading it is expensive

The work

The constraint that set the approachThe interface here is idiosyncratic, and users had grown so used to it that any attempt to move beyond the familiar produced the opposite of an improvement: people got lost exactly where they used to work on autopilot. We tested that, accepted it as given, and solved problems through structure instead of visuals – the order of data, the logic of sections, the user’s path. The design stayed the same and the product got better. For a service people come to for facts rather than for an impression, that’s the only approach that works

Where the money leakedThe features are paid, and the main drop-off was at payment. The second was search: people failed to find the company they needed and left before reaching the product at all. We eventually rebuilt search as its own project

Working with the teamA distinct part of the role was translating a hard domain into something a designer can actually work from. Financial reporting doesn’t survive being explained in conversation, so I broke it down in diagrams – data flows, states, dependencies – and briefed from those. A diagram drawn before the mockup removed half the questions and nearly all the rework